If you don't feel that overwhelming rush of love when your GD baby is born...
IT WILL STILL BE OK!!!
One of the biggest fears people have when they're pregnant and going through GD, is the fear that they won't feel immediately head over heels in love with their baby. Or baby may have arrived and mom still feels kinda detached. Where is that overwhelming rush of love that we were promised!???
With my DS 3, I had kind of a hard time bonding with him...nothing at all to do with GD, but it was just weird to have a baby in the house after so long and he was a tough baby too. Bad sleeper, bad eater, constantly fussy, hated cuddling...nothing like my two older sons and it took all of my Jedi mom abilities just to deal with him on a daily basis. I never had that overwhelming rush of love for him like I did my older sons. For months I felt like a kindly babysitter more than a mom and though over the course of time I grew to adore him to an insane degree just like the others, it was slower in coming.
If I had still been struggling with GD at that point, it would have been very easy for me to chalk it up to GD and think, if only he was a girl then this wouldn't be happening. The angry, bitter part of me even wanted to do that sometimes. But being totally honest with myself, I had to admit that I didn't even really have full-blown GD by the time he was born. He was just a tough baby (he's still a handful), and I would bet big money that there are tons of people out there who did get their desired gender and still had a hard time bonding with them. Some babies are just easier to bond with than others are, and this is true regardless of gender. We have to be careful not to look at everything in our lives through our GD goggles and blame our baby's gender for every bump we hit on the road of life.
So if you've read posts about how special someone's GD baby is and feel bad that you don't feel the same, don't. Not every parent feels that love right away, and that's ok. That's why babies are born so relatively unformed, sometimes it takes a bit of time to fall madly in love with them. As long as their diapers are changed and they're warm and fed, they're happy...they'll never know about those times when you didn't feel that connection, those moments where it felt like you had been handed a very small and demanding stranger constantly spewing disgusting fluids from every orifice.
Having an infant turns your life upside down and your universe inside out, and this is true of every parent everywhere, those who got their desired gender and those who didn't. Every parent has conflicting emotions towards their children. Every parent has days when they regret ever beginning the whole operation and would much prefer to chuck it all and move to Tahiti. It isn't because you didn't get your dream child, it's because no child is a dream child, and a huge part of parenting is letting go of that dream child (does anyone really have that gorgeous genius Olympic gold medalist that we all envision when we dream of our children??) and embracing the strange and smelly dictator that the stork delivered to you.
